Coca-Cola Spreads Subliminal Racism While Spreading Happiness

The fight for the NFL championship is the biggest sports event of the year every year. And millions of people are not just tuning in for the football or halftime show. With thirty-second spots selling for an average of $4 million a pop, commercials have become the stars of the show. This past Super Bowl was no exception. Nationwide Insurance killed the mood but helped foster an uncomfortable yet necessary conversation about life insurance for children. Budweiser brought everyone to tears with their adorable puppy and protective Clydesdales. GoDaddy made headlines a few days before kickoff when they succumbed to public pressure and pulled their ad about a missing dog.

But Coca-Cola probably takes first prize in the subliminal racism category. The whole point of their commercial was to spread happiness instead of hate but the 30-second commercial ended up spreading a common stereotype regarding the Black community. It starts out with different images of people being bullied and harassed online but after a Black male who’s drinking a Coca-Cola while working inside of the data center, the world does a complete 180 degrees and it’s all about love and happiness.

Seems innocent enough. Until you take a moment to think about it. Beverages are never allowed in the data center for fear of it spilling and short-circuiting the wires. But somehow, he snuck one in and instead of being careful, oops! The Coca-Cola spills on the server, reinforcing the stereotype that Blacks are nothing but buffoons. It’s no secret that there are very few Blacks in the tech industry and there are very few Black engineers. The odds of a Black man working in the data center in the cloud are less than 5 percent. But screw that because someone has to spill the coke on the equipment and who better to do that than a Black person!

The media has a history of portraying Blacks in less than pleasant light. Good for nothing but buffoons and mammies, Black people were used for cheap laughs, never having any depth or brains to be anything more than servants. Times have changed but like the old saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

British actor David Oyelowo recently spoke about the snubs Selma received at the Oscars. “We, as Black people, have been celebrated more for when we are subservient, when we are not being leaders or kings or being at the center of our own narrative," Oyelowo said during his appearance at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

To further drive his point home, the 12 Years A Slave argued that "Denzel Washington should have won for playing Malcolm X" and that Sidney Poitier should have won his Oscar for In the Heat of the Night rather than Lilies of the Field. "So this bears out what I'm saying," Oyelowo continued, "Which is we've just got to come to the point whereby there isn't a self-fulfilling prophecy — a notion of who black people are — that feeds into what we are celebrated as, not just in the Academy, but in life generally. We have been slaves, we have been domestic servants, we have been criminals, we have been all of those things. But we have been leaders, we have been kings, we have been those who changed the world."

But in a Coca-Cola commercial with an historic 120.8 million people tuned in to the biggest sporting event on the planet, the Black man is still the bumbling fool who just can’t do the job right without breaking the rules by sneaking in a beverage and then messing everything up. My, how things have stayed the same.